In development projects, a delay in connection with budget overruns is often the consequence of unrealistic scheduling. A simulation based approach for modeling development projects has been developed to support the project planner and will be presented in this paper. This novel approach allows the modeling and simulation of the project-specific structural organization and the process organization as well as the typical non-deterministic project behavior. Therefore, a realistic scheduling and resource allocation of complex development projects can be achieved. The application of the approach in projects of our industrial partners in the chemical industry has shown the suitability of the developed tools.